


Engine of Survival

by marinarusalka



Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-06-12
Updated: 2008-06-12
Packaged: 2017-11-16 19:21:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/542976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marinarusalka/pseuds/marinarusalka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yinsen's story</p>
            </blockquote>





	Engine of Survival

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Leonard Cohen's "The Future." Big thanks to dotfic for encouragement and beta reading.

On April 12, 2003 Dr. Yasin Rasoul, known to his friends in England as Yinsen, returned to Afghanistan to deliver a series of guest lectures on biomechanics at Kabul University. It was only the third time he'd set foot in his native country in over thirty years.

Yinsen liked to think of himself as a citizen of the world. He'd studied mechanical engineering in Kabul, biology in Tehran, medicine at Cambridge (where his ancient tutor's consistent inability to pronounce "Yasin" led to his unofficial name change). He spoke six languages fluently, and four more well enough to get by. He met his wife Anna in Budapest, married her in Istanbul. By the time he'd settled in London with a prestigious position at University College Hospital, most of his friends and colleagues weren't even aware that he'd started life as a dirt-poor farmer's son in Gulmira.

He came back the first time for his sister's wedding, the second time for his father's funeral. Both visits left him frightened and depressed. He could see no future for his country, nothing but endless bloody chaos. He told himself he'd done well to get out when he could, to build a life for himself and his family that was free of starvation and bloodshed. He ignored the nagging sense of incompleteness at the back of his mind, the feeling of work left undone.

"Come back to England with me," he told his mother after the funeral. "You will like it there. Anna and I will take good care of you."

His mother smiled and kissed him on the cheek. "You're a good son," she said, "but this is my home. I'm too old to try to fit in anywhere else. Besides, I can't leave your sister here alone."

"Mariam can come too," Yinsen said, but he knew even as he spoke that it would never happen. His sister's husband was in the army; she saw him two or three times a year at best. Moving to England would almost certainly mean never seeing him again. 

Yinsen stayed in Gulmira for a week after the funeral, then returned to England alone.

When he went to deliver his lectures in Kabul, Anna came with him for the first time. Yinsen had argued against it, thought it was too dangerous, but Anna wouldn't be persuaded.

"I want to meet your family," she said. "I want to see your home."

Yinsen glanced around their tastefully appointed Regent's Park flat.

"This is home," he said, but he knew it wasn't what she'd meant.

So he brought her with him to Kabul, and then to Gulmira, where she met his mother and sister for the first time. Mariam had managed to get pregnant during one of her husband's rare visits, and the twin boys were now four years old. They were small for their age. Yinsen could see the marks of malnutrition on them. The two boxes of canned soup he and Anna had shipped with them from England suddenly seemed ridiculously, almost insultingly inadequate.

Watching his wife's face as she played with the boys made his gut twist painfully. Anna had had six miscarriages in eight years before the doctors ordered her to stop trying. Yinsen told himself that it didn't matter, that he and Anna only needed each other for complete happiness. Most of the time, it was true. But every now and then he found himself lying awake at night, wondering if a five-page CV was all the legacy he'd ever leave behind.

* * *

Three days later, Yinsen toured the new hospital that was being built in central Kabul. It had been partially funded by the UN, and was meant to be the most modern, best equipped civilian hospital in Afghanistan.

Yinsen was horrified.

"This equipment was outdated twenty years ago!" he ranted at Anna. "And the surgical facilities are practically barbaric! What are they thinking, Anna? This place couldn't possibly serve a city in a war zone."

"You think you can do better," Anna said. It wasn't a question.

Yinsen stared at her in startled silence for a few moments. "Yes," he said after a while, "I do."

It took over a year and most of Yinsen's life savings to get the project into motion. Yinsen and Anna made multiple trips between Kabul and London, made use of every scientific and diplomatic contact Yinsen had made in the course of his career, solicited donations of money and equipment. Anna proved herself to be a bureaucratic miracle worker, handling paperwork in multiple languages, able to make sense of the most byzantine international regulations and to badger the most recalcitrant officials into action. Slowly but surely, the hospital in Kabul began to transform into a truly modern facility.

Yinsen accepted the chief of surgery post. Anna signed on as chief administrator. They lived in a tiny apartment behind the British embassy, spent most of their waking hours at the hospital, and went to Gulmira every other weekend. 

Sometimes, Yinsen would shake his head and laugh at the irony of it all. He'd spent decades building a life as far from Afghanistan as he could get, and now here he was. Back in the war zone and feeling, for the first time in his life, that he was exactly where he was meant to be. 

Perhaps his legacy would be something more than his CV after all.

* * *

On June 10, 2006, Yinsen had too much to drink while attending the wedding of one of Mariam's friends in Gulmira. The next morning, he felt too ill to join the rest of his family for a trip to the market two villages over. He slept in while his mother, Anna, Mariam and the twins all drove out in the battered Jeep that now served as his and Anna's family car.

Forty minutes later, they tripped a land mine while taking a detour around a rockslide that had blocked the usual road.

Yinsen had few clear memories of the weeks that followed. The villagers took care of him, ensuring that he ate and slept and otherwise functioned at the minimum level necessary for survival. He knew there must've been a funeral, because he saw the graves later, but he had no recollection of it. There was only the black haze of grief and loss.

He might've been tempted to stay in that haze forever. But the hospital still needed him, and Anna would've wanted him to go on. A small, unbroken part of him still knew that. It took some time before he found the strength to translate the knowledge into action, but eventually, Yinsen pulled himself together and returned to Kabul.

For three months, he threw himself obsessively into his work. He abandoned the apartment behind the embassy, moved a cot into his office, went days at a time without leaving the hospital. The staff whispered nervously behind his back, but no one dared to actually speak their concern to his face. Yinsen was fine with that.

He was just putting on his tie one morning, getting ready for another day at work, when the attack came. A burst of gunfire in the hallway, voices screaming -- he barely had a chance to realize something was wrong before the door crashed open. A bald man in dusty fatigues pointed a rifle at Yinsen's face.

"My name is Raza," the man growled in thickly accented Dari. "You work for me now."

* * *

Raza and his men lived in a cave. Or a network of caves, really, an underground maze blasted from the belly of a mountain. They had generators to provide electricity, a frighteningly well-stocked arsenal, a fleet of armored trucks. They may not have had the manpower of the military, but Yinsen suspected they were better equipped.

One of the caves was set up as an infirmary. There were half a dozen cots, an operating table, an ancient X-ray machine, some primitive life support equipment. Crude, but not much worse than what the Kabul hospital had made do with before Yinsen took an interest.

A man lay unconscious on one of the cots, his right leg swathed in blood-soaked bandages, his skin fever-flushed and beaded with sweat.

"This is Abu Bakaar, my second in command," Raza said. "You will take care of him."

Yinsen thought about refusing. It would've been the easiest thing to do. He would say no, and Raza would kill him, and that would be the end of all his problems. The prospect of dying brought no fear. What it did bring was bitter disappointment at the waste of it all. He had made his first and last effort to create something truly worthwhile, something that would outlast him, and that effort had cost him everything. His life was all he had left, and though it felt like a small and useless thing now, it held his only hope of salvaging something from this wreckage. He had no idea what he could do, alone inside a mountain and surrounded by murderers, but if he died now it would be the end not only of himself but of his entire family. He couldn't let that happen. He had to do better than that.

"I don't know if I can save the leg," he said. "It looks infected. A clean amputation might be the only way--"

Raza silenced him with a cold, flat glare. "If he dies, you will die. If he loses a leg, you will lose a leg."

It took eight hours of surgery and three courses of antibiotics, but doctor and patient both came through with all their limbs attached.

* * *

The reward for Yinsen's success was a cave of his very own, with a steel door that only locked from the outside and a security camera in one corner. There was a cot, a blanket, and a wood-burning stove for Yinsen to cook his meals on. He had to barter his watch to one of Raza's men for a pot and a spoon.

The first time the door slammed shut behind him, Yinsen sat down on the cot, thought about his abandoned London flat, and laughed until his chest hurt and his face was wet with tears.

As time went by, he began to accumulate more possessions. Even murdering terrorists were capable of small gestures of gratitude, apparently, and the men whose wounds Yinsen tended sometimes responded with material tokens. A new pair of socks, a safety razor, a can of evaporated milk, a backgammon set... Yinsen accepted everything he was given with a pleasant smile, soft words of thanks, and no illusions whatsoever. He knew that the man handing him a hunk of cheese wrapped in waxed paper had almost certainly murdered somebody for it. He knew that if Raza gave the word, any one of the men he'd treated would put a bullet in his head without a second thought.

His skill as a surgeon made him useful enough to keep. His permanent presence made him familiar enough for small pleasantries. None of that changed the fact that he was a prisoner, a walking dead man waiting only for the opportunity to make his death mean something. 

Opportunity arrived on a stretcher in the back of a truck, bleeding out from a chestful of shrapnel.

The wounded man wasn't one of Raza's, that was obvious enough at first glance. His black business suit was torn and filthy, but the damage didn't entirely disguise the quality of the tailoring. American or Western European, Yinsen thought, looking down at the pale, dirt-smudged face. Young. Obviously wealthy. A kidnapped diplomat, perhaps? The body armor under the man's shredded shirt looked custom-made to fit him, and much more high-tech than any of the military models Yinsen had seen.

Not that it had done its wearer any good...

"Who is he?" Yinsen asked Abu Bakaar, and got a narrow-eyed glare in response. Raza's lieutenant might've been the first patient Yinsen had treated at the compound, but he had never bothered to be civil in return.

"That's none of your concern," he growled now. "All you need to do is make sure he lives."

Yinsen slipped one hand beneath the unconscious man's head and gently lifted it until the man's jaw fell slack to reveal a mouthful of perfect orthodontics. Yes, definitely American.

The first round of surgery was little more than emergency first aid. Stop the bleeding, remove the larger pieces of shrapnel, stabilize the patient's vital signs. Halfway through, Yinsen began to think that the man on his operating table looked oddly familiar. At first, he discarded the thought. He'd crossed paths with a fair number of wealthy Americans in his old life, but the likelihood of randomly reencountering one of them in an Afghan cave seemed too remote to contemplate. Still, the nagging sense of familiarity wouldn't go away.

It wasn't until later that night, when the American regained consciousness in the infirmary, that the memory clicked into place. 

"Where am I?" the man rasped, looking blearily from side to side.

Something about the voice made Yinsen think of a robotics conference in Berne. He stared with renewed attention at the American's face, tried to imagine what it might look like when it wasn't pale from blood loss and drawn tight with pain. He'd seen that face in endless newspaper and magazine photos, just as he'd seen the name on most of Raza's weapons. Stark.

It was just as well, Yinsen thought, that he hadn't recognized the man during surgery. The temptation to let the bastard die on the table would've been too great.

He was still processing his reaction when Raza and Abu Bakaar stormed in, accompanied by three of the junior men. They shoved Yinsen aside and dragged Stark from his cot, waving their rifles around as if there was a real threat in the room rather than one elderly surgeon and one mortally wounded war profiteer.

Stark thrashed around a little when they grabbed him, but it looked more like confused flailing than any real attempt to struggle. He was clearly disoriented and weak as a kitten. A single backhanded blow from Raza was enough to stun him into silence. He didn't even resist when one of the men put a burlap hood over his head.

"He shouldn't be moved," Yinsen protested. 

Raza barely spared him a glance. "We'll bring him back."

They were gone just over an hour. Yinsen spent that time sitting alone in the infirmary and contemplating the puzzle of Stark's presence in the compound. Raza and his men were Stark's loyal customers, but they clearly weren't his friends. They wanted him alive, but seemed to have little concern for his well-being. It didn't add up.

Stark was unconscious when they brought him back, fresh blood soaking through the bandages over his torso.

"Look what you've done," Yinsen said. "You've ripped all the stitches out. If he bleeds to death from--"

"You will keep him alive," Raza said in a flat voice that allowed for no possibility of disagreement, "for as long as I require it. Do whatever is necessary."

Yinsen wasn't sure if he was up to the task. He'd removed all the larger pieces of shrapnel from Stark's chest, but he'd seen similar injuries often enough to know that it wasn't enough. There were still pieces of metal floating in Stark's bloodstream, most of them too small to see with the naked eye yet still big enough to be fatal once they reached the heart. He'd never seen anyone survive such a wound for more than a few days.

He looked down at Stark's motionless form and thought back to the notes he'd made at the hospital months before, outlining the pros and cons of a theoretical procedure he'd never actually had a chance to try. The conditions in the caves were hardly ideal for experimental surgery, but what did he have to lose, after all?

Yinsen adjusted his glasses and gave Raza a thin-lipped smile.

"I'll need a battery from one of the cars," he said.

* * *

Stark was feverish and delirious for days after the second surgery. Yinsen moved him from the infirmary to his cell, stuck a morphine drip in his arm and a feeding tube up his nose, began a course of antibiotics, and kept his fingers crossed.

He removed the drip after two days, mostly because Raza kept eyeing the dwindling morphine supply and muttering darkly under his breath. Stark tossed restlessly on his cot, sweating buckets despite the permanent chill of the cave. He murmured endearments at imaginary women, insisted that somebody named Rhodey shouldn't be angry with him, and kept begging, repeatedly and incongruously, for pepper. Several times, Yinsen was certain that the man was going to die within the hour. But after a week, Stark's fever broke and the delirium was replaced with exhausted sleep.

Yinsen breathed a quiet sigh of relief and set down to consider his options. The very idea of having options felt alien. After months of surviving day-to-day, focused on no goal beyond survival itself, he had to force himself to think in the long term again. This was, or could be, the chance he'd been waiting for. In a world ruled by bombs and guns and guided missiles, Tony Stark was a power. Or at least he had been once, and might one day be again. If he survived long enough. If Yinsen could help him survive long enough.

He retreated to the back of the cave, stripped off the borrowed fatigues he'd been wearing for days, and changed into the clothes he'd had on at the hospital when Raza had come for him. It took him a few moments to remember how to knot the tie. The suit jacket felt loose in the shoulders, and he had to poke a new hole in the belt to keep his trousers up. Then he took out the worn safety razor and small, grimy mirror for which he'd traded his cufflinks months ago, and proceeded to make himself as presentable as circumstances would allow.

He wanted to make a clear distinction between himself and Raza's men. Wanted Stark to be able to see the difference as soon as he woke up.

Stark woke up bleary and confused, but the confusion quickly turned into suspicion. The first words out of his mouth were "What the hell did you do to me?" He didn't look very grateful upon being told that Yinsen had saved his life. Given the circumstances, Yinsen couldn't really blame him.

He'd hoped to have some time to talk properly with Stark, but it only took a couple of minutes for Abu Bakaar and his goon squad to come storming in. Yinsen watched Stark closely as he translated Abu Bakaar's demands, trying to gauge the man's character through his reaction. Stark's stance was tense and wary, but the expression on his face was strangely... distracted. Standing there with his hands in the air and a machine gun pointed at his face, Stark looked as if he was trying to solve a physics problem in his head.

Abu Bakaar handed over a photo of the Jericho missile. Stark blinked at it in silence while Yinsen finished translating. When he looked up, the distracted look was gone from his face and his eyes were shuttered. "I refuse," he said. His voice hitched on the last syllable just a little.

Yinsen wondered if he needed to translate that too, but Abu Bakaar seemed to get the idea well enough. He spat curses in three languages and gestured to his men, who rushed forward to hustle Stark toward the door. Stark lurched a little as a rifle barrel poked him in the back, but recovered his footing quickly and snatched the car battery from the table before he staggered forward.

"Don't wait up, honey!" he called over his shoulder a moment before the door slammed shut behind him.

Stark was gone for several hours. Yinsen wasn't sure how long, exactly, because he spent most of that time asleep. He had learned the hard way to sleep whenever he got the chance, even if it was only for an hour or two. Day and night made no difference underground, and there was no way to predict when or how often he might get dragged out of bed to perform emergency surgery at a moment's notice. It was rather like doing a residency again, thirty years after the first time.

So Yinsen curled up on his cot and slept until the grinding noise of steel against rock woke him. He sat up and put his glasses on in time to see two men dragging Stark into the cell, while a third man followed close behind with the battery.

Stark appeared unconscious until his captors let him drop to the floor. Then he swore hoarsely and tried to scramble away on his hands and knees until the cables in his chest jerked him to a stop. His shirt was soaked, and his hair was plastered wetly to his scalp. The man who had the battery set it down with a thump, and Stark instantly curled one arm around it as if he was afraid it would walk off. He stayed still until Raza's men walked out, then rolled onto his side and retched. It looked painful and brought up nothing but water and ropy spit. After a minute or so Stark gave up the effort and collapsed into an exhausted heap.

Yinsen moved forward, and Stark lifted his head to glare at him. He was shivering, lips tinged blue. His face looked dangerously pale in the dim light.

"Don't touch me," he spat out.

Yinsen stopped and held up his empty hands.

"I'm not going to hurt you."

The short bark of laughter Stark let out sounded more painful than the retching had been. "I think your friends took care of that part just fine, thanks."

"They're not my friends." Yinsen took the blanket from his cot and dropped it on the floor where Stark could reach it by flinging out an arm. "And if you stay on the floor in those wet clothes, you're going to get hypothermia."

"Yeah." Stark coughed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "That's totally my biggest worry right now."

"Suit yourself." Yinsen fetched a small saucepan of water from the corner of the cell he'd designated as his kitchen, and put it on the stove. By the time the water came to a boil, Stark had cocooned himself in the blanket, but still hadn't moved from his spot on the floor.

Yinsen dug out the tin that held his precious and rapidly dwindling supply of tea leaves and scooped a couple of spoonfuls into the pan. He used a strip of gauze to strain the tea into a mug and carried it back to Stark, who let him approach without protest this time. 

Stark sniffed suspiciously at the tea, took a sip and grimaced. "What is this shit?"

"Arsenic," Yinsen said dryly.

Stark gave him a startled look that slowly shifted into a thin-lipped grin. "My favorite flavor," he drawled, and took another sip. The hot liquid seemed to do him good. He shivered less and less as he kept drinking, and his color returned to something that might almost pass for normal. "Thanks," he grunted as he put the empty mug down.

"You're welcome." Yinsen brought out his small box of personal first aid supplies and set it on the cot. "Now, why don't you get out of that wet shirt and let me check you over?"

"I'm fine right here, thanks," Stark said quickly. 

Yinsen bit back his irritation, reminded himself that the man had legitimate reason to be skittish.

"If I wanted to do you harm," he said, "I've had plenty of opportunity while you were unconscious. I'm a doctor. Let me help you."

Stark hesitated, then sighed and disentangled himself from the blanket. "A little help?" he said, and Yinsen came over to lift the battery so he could stand up and they could shuffle over to Stark's cot together.

Stark sat down, pulled his shirt off, and let it drop to the floor. He sat with his chin tucked down and his arms held closely against his sides, looking ready to bolt at any second. There were fresh bruises on his sides and back, and what looked like a cigar burn in the crook of his left elbow. The skin around the magnet was red and slightly swollen. Yinsen smeared on antibiotic ointment, checked Stark's pulse and temperature, listened to his breathing with a stethoscope. 

"Patient's vital signs are normal," he wrote in his notebook. "There are no indications of pneumonia or any other nosocomial infection."

Stark traced the edge of the magnet with one fingertip. "I take it," he said, "this isn't a routine procedure."

"First time I ever tried it," Yinsen told him. "It's going very well. If I ever get out of here, I can publish a paper on you."

Stark gave him a sharp look. "Do you expect to get out of here?"

Yinsen shrugged. "A man can dream."

"Yeah, I'm dreaming of a steak dinner and a scotch on the rocks right now." Stark attempted a laugh, but it rang hollow. He fell silent for a long while, staring at the floor with a blank expression, stirring only slightly when Yinsen draped a blanket over his shoulders. When he did finally speak, his voice came out flat and muted.

"I didn't give them what they want. Somehow, I don't think they're going to take 'no' for an answer."

"I expect not," Yinsen said.

"I don't think I can do this." Stark's hands clenched into a white-knuckled grip around the edge of the cot. "Fuck. How do people do this?"

"Most people don't. Most people do what's demanded of them, or they die."

"Wow," Stark said, "you're a great comfort in my time of need." There was a hint of anger in his voice, which Yinsen considered an improvement over his previous blank despair.

"I can make you another cup of tea. If you want more comfort than that, you're in the wrong place."

For the next few hours, Stark brooded and Yinsen mostly left him alone. This, he suspected, was the testing point. Stark would break or he would find a way to go on, and there was little Yinsen could do about it either way. He knew what the most likely outcome was. But he had a feeling Stark would prove stronger than he looked.

When Raza's men came back, Stark came quietly. Yinsen settled in for another long wait, but only a few minutes passed before more men came to march him outside. Stark was already there, swaying on his feet as he clutched the battery against his side. He flinched when the hood was removed from his face, and blinked at the sunlight with startled, watery eyes.

Once again, Yinsen translated Abu Bakaar's demands for the Jericho missile.

"He wants you to start right away," he said at the end, "and when you're done, he will set you free."

Stark shook Abu Bakaar's hand with a bland, pleasant smile that gave nothing away. "No, he won't."

"No," Yinsen agreed. "He won't."

Back in the cave, Stark sat and stared into space with the same empty look that had worried Yinsen before. Yinsen did his best to be patient, but the longer Stark's silence dragged on, the more he felt his own fear and anger bubbling to the surface. 

"Look," he demanded, willing Stark to listen, willing him to goddamn _do_ something. "What you just saw -- that is your legacy, Stark. Your life's work in the hands of these murderers! Is this how you want to go out? Is this the last act of defiance of the great Tony Stark? Or are you going to do something about it?"

"I shouldn't do anything." Stark spoke without looking at him. "They're going to kill me... you... either way, and even if they don't, I'll probably be dead in a week."

Yinsen couldn't really argue with that. 

"Well, then," he said, "this is a very important week for you, isn't it?"

Stark lifted his head to meet Yinsen's gaze, and Yinsen realized that he'd been misreading him. Stark's expression wasn't empty. It was the same distracted doing-equations-in-his-head look that he'd worn when Abu Bakaar first came for him. Yinsen felt a small, fragile hope flicker to life.

"It's possible," Stark said with forced casualness, "that I might have a plan."

* * *

The change in Stark's demeanor was startling. With a goal to work toward, he shifted from glum stillness to babbling hyperactivity in seconds. He rattled off his supply list to Abu Bakaar so fast that Yinsen fell three sentences behind in his translation and spent the next five minutes scrambling to catch up. Once the equipment was in place, he set to work immediately, disassembling one of the dozen disarmed missiles he'd been given to get at the electronics inside. His hands were quick and steady, his gaze entirely clear for the first time since he woke from surgery. It was like looking at a different person entirely.

Stark wouldn't say what his plan was, so Yinsen was left with nothing to do but hover over his shoulder and watch. Stark chattered at him, random and inattentive, asking questions without really hearing the answers. The only time he seemed fully aware of Yinsen's presence was when he was giving instructions.

Yinsen did as he was told: dismantling the other missile housings in silence, extracting the palladium strips, melting them in the newly-installed furnace. It wasn't until he carried the crucible over to the workstation, his hands surgery-steady on the tongs, and poured the liquid metal into the mold Stark had made, that Stark appeared to abruptly realize that he had an actual human being working alongside him.

"What do I call you?" He asked.

"My name is Yinsen."

"Nice to meet you, Yinsen."

* * *

"So," Yinsen asked later that night while heating up a can of beans for their supper, "where did you learn to do all that? I wouldn't have expected the CEO of a billion-dollar corporation to ever have to do his own metalsmithing."

"Oh, that." Stark smirked. "My sophomore year at MIT, me and a bunch of guys from my dorm snuck into Harvard Yard one night and put John Harvard in a cage."

Yinsen raised his eyebrows. "I was under the impression that John Harvard died sometime in the seventeenth century."

"Not the _guy_." Stark rolled his eyes. "The statue. It's an MIT tradition."

"Putting John Harvard in a cage?"

"Making Harvard look like idiots. Not that it's difficult or anything."

Yinsen hid a smile behind his hand. "Of course not."

"Anyhow, we couldn't just waltz in carrying a ten-foot-high cast iron cage, could we? So we made it modular. Two hundred and twelve pieces that all fitted together like a puzzle. We carried them in inside our coats, then assembled the whole thing around the statue."

"Clever."

"Totally brilliant, if I do say so myself. Anyhow, you can't just make something like that from random stuff you buy at the hardware store. We had to make all the pieces ourselves."

"And that's how you learned?"

"That's how I learned." Stark's grin made him look about twenty years younger, and Yinsen found himself grinning back.

He decided he quite liked Tony Stark. It was an odd feeling; Yinsen could barely remember the last time he'd talked to somebody he actually liked.

* * *

The arc reactor took Yinsen by surprise. He'd known that Stark was brilliant, had in fact been counting on that brilliance as an essential part of his own slowly forming plan. But watching him lift the glowing device in his hand, enough power to run a small city coiled in a fist-sized bundle of wire and glass, took Yinsen's breath away. If Stark could do this, then he could do anything Yinsen required of him. He could escape. He could change the world.

Even the revelation that Stark's escape plan hinged on turning himself into a giant action toy wasn't enough to discourage Yinsen's growing hope. One way or another, they would make it work.

The arc reactor might've been the technical innovation of the century, but it only took a couple of days to create. The suit took over two months, mostly because there was no way to speed up the metal work. Yinsen tried to help at first, but it didn't take long to discover that he simply didn't have the physical strength for blacksmithing. He could help with assembly, with tooling the smaller parts, with refining the design, but Stark still had to do the bulk of the work.

He threw himself into it with frightening intensity, hammering away at the forge for hours at a time, stopping only when he literally didn't have the strength to lift his arm anymore. The air in the cave stank of smoke and hot metal all the time, and the noise left Yinsen with a permanent headache. He learned to ignore it; he was more concerned with Stark's health than his own.

"You do remember you're supposed to be recovering from heart surgery?" he asked as he watched stark gulp down both their daily water rations at once. "Please don't undo all my hard work by dying from dehydration."

"I'm fine. I feel great. No one's dying of anything around here." Stark put the empty jug down and started to rise from the bench. 

Yinsen poked one finger against his chest, just above the pale blue glow of the arc reactor. It wasn't a very hard poke, but Stark's knees buckled and he sat back down with a thump.

"Stay," Yinsen told him. "Rest. Or I swear, I'll tie you to your cot."

"Kinky," Stark muttered. But he leaned back until his shoulders were braced again the wall, and stayed there without further protest.

Yinsen tried to barter his wedding ring for more water, but none of the guards would go for it.

* * *

"Okay, let's go over this again." Stark was in his full manic mode, pacing between his workstation and the wall as he went over the final part of the plan for what felt like the hundredth time. "Once I'm powered up, you don't go anywhere I haven't gone first, got it?"

Yinsen nodded. "Got it."

"I will blast our way out. You keep at least twenty feet behind me at all times, you _never_ turn a corner until I give the signal, got it?"

"Got it."

"Now, when we get to that long stretch of corridor in the middle, I want you to..."

Yinsen did his best to look attentive and to nod at appropriate moments, but he really wasn't listening anymore. It would be too difficult to hide his amusement if he actually paid attention to Stark's words. Tony Stark might be a genius, but Yinsen had long since acknowledged the fact that the man didn't have the common sense Allah gave a goat. 

He really believed that they were both getting out alive. That by donning his suit of not-so-shining armor, he could somehow magically extend his protection to Yinsen. In Tony Stark's imagination, their escape was playing out as a fairy-tale adventure, with himself as the knight-errant battling his way to a happy ending for everyone.

Yinsen was no damsel in distress. He knew perfectly well how this story ended for him.

"...And then we grab one of the armored trucks so I can sit in the back while you drive, got it?"

"Got it."

* * *

Raza was bound to get suspicious sooner or later. Yinsen knew it, prepared for it, rehearsed dozens of convincing lies in his head. None of it helped when he found himself on his knees, the side of his face pressed painfully against rough metal, watching Raza move ever closer with that glowing coal.

"Give me the truth," Raza said, and all of Yinsen's clever lies vanished from his mind, swept away by a wave of primal fear.

"He's building your Jericho!" he insisted over and over, hearing the desperation in his own voice, unable to control it. He couldn't take his eyes off that coal, couldn't think... He thought maybe he was whimpering but he couldn't be sure, his own voice seemed so small and distant...

"I need him," Stark blurted out somewhere nearby. Yinsen couldn't see him, but he could hear the tension in his voice. "Good assistant."

Raza let them sweat for a few more seconds before dropping the coal on top of the anvil, close enough for Yinsen to feel the heat on his face. "You have until tomorrow to assemble my missile," he said and stormed out, the other men falling into line behind him.

Yinsen scrambled backwards away from the anvil until he bumped into Stark's worktable and had to resist the mad urge to crawl under it. His legs felt too weak to hold him up, so he stayed where he was, taking deep breaths and waiting for his heartbeat to slow back to normal.

" _Jesus Christ_ , Yinsen!" Stark was on his knees next to him, looking as pale and shaken as Yinsen himself felt. He clasped Yinsen's shoulders for a moment, his grip tight enough to hurt, then patted Yinsen's face with an unsteady hand. "I can't believe you did that."

"I didn't do anything," Yinsen said. 

Stark made a small, strangled sound. "Didn't _do_ anything? They almost-- They were going to-- Shit. They were going to--"

"Well, they didn't." Stark's obvious panic helped Yinsen regain his own calm. They couldn't afford to both fall apart at the same time. He brushed Stark's hands away and rose to his feet, feeling only a little unsteady. "You heard the man. We have until tomorrow. Better get to work, then."

* * *

Yinsen wasn't surprised when the guards started pounding on the door while he was still bolting Stark into the armor. Unlike Stark, he'd never believed that they would be able to work out of sight of the security camera for more than a few minutes without arousing suspicion. 

He wasn't afraid anymore, not really. He'd known for weeks that this day was coming. Stark was babbling about checkpoints, about sticking to the plan, but he would find out soon enough. Yinsen _was_ sticking to the plan. His own.

The machine gun felt surprisingly awkward and heavy in his hands. He'd never fired one before, didn't know how to hold or aim it properly, but that was all right. He was trying for a diversion, not a slaughter. The guards ducked and ran when he fired over their heads, and he ran after them, shouting his exhilaration at the top of his voice. It was almost over. He felt _good_.

He almost made it outside, could actually see sunlight when he turned the final corner and found himself facing a roomful of armed men. Until that moment, he hadn't even known for sure it was daytime. 

That was good, he thought as they opened fire. He hadn't seen daylight in weeks. It was good to get a glimpse at the end.

Pain, then darkness, then pain again. It wasn't fair. He was supposed to be dead now. Yinsen groaned and opened his eyes, just in time to see Raza aiming a rocket launcher at Stark's armored figure.

"Watch out!" he yelled.

Stark dodged Raza's shot and retaliated with a stream of flame. Yinsen thought he should feel some sort of satisfaction upon seeing Raza go down, but he was too busy struggling to breathe. The air was turning to razor blades in his lungs. Every breath sliced him open deeper.

Stark loomed over him, faceplate open, looking at Yinsen with big earnest eyes. He was still going on about them both getting out, about sticking to the plan, good God, didn't the man ever give up?

"This was always the plan," Yinsen told him, and watched realization finally dawn on Stark's face. "My family is dead. I'm going to see them now."

He hoped that was true. Hoped he'd been a good enough man to go wherever Anna was waiting. He'd tried. That had to count for something, didn't it?

"Thank you for saving me," Stark said softly.

Yinsen sucked in another painful breath. "Don't waste it. Don't waste your life." _Don't waste my life._

It was over. Dr. Yasin Rasoul had taken his shot at changing the world and failed. It was Tony Stark's turn now.

Yinsen turned his head and watched his life's legacy walk out of the cave, shaking the ground with his steel boots.

_Don't waste it,_ he thought, and closed his eyes.

* * *

_I've seen the nations rise and fall / I've heard the stories, heard them all / but love's the only engine of survival -- Leonard Cohen_


End file.
